Today we want to consume as much as we can, we have grown to be an impatient society. I watch TV and I do not like waiting until next week, I want to watch it all. Online Streaming of Netflix is a thing, they drop an entire season of content in one day.

We love it, it creates and feeds the addiction, the satisfaction we get is euphoric. How many times have you spent hours watching a series? Most recently I started watching Vampire Diaries on Netflix (don’t judge), I can not get enough of episode after episode. Knowing I do not have to wait until next week, or commercials, it is pure entertainment bliss.

That is the appeal to us, the society who loves binge watching tv, movies. Understand something, TV networks understand this love of binge watching. Have you ever came across a movie marathon where they play back to back movies? What about your favorite HGTV show? Ever wonder why they play the same series and repeat of those over and over again?

The answer is simple we as a society have created binge watching to be the norm today.

As I watch my current show I am anxiously awaiting TheDefenders to drop on Netflix. As this post is about binge watching you can bet I will do the same. I have binged on every other series in the Marvel collection. I wish that Agents of shield would drop the same way.

How do you break the addiction caused by binge watching? How does it impact us? I honestly do not know, what I do know is that my 14yr old daughter got me into a show I never would of thought I would like. So to me if binge watching series brings time with my family or something to discuss about with my friends, I am all for it. I will still have the desire and curse the TV when I watch it, as I have been accustomed to binge watching entertainment today.

I’d like to state up front I have no inside knowledge on CodeSpaces, these opinions were formed based on the information they posted at http://www.codespaces.com/

I don’t know any of the people at CodeSpaces, however what I do know of them drives home the point that developers are not operations people (operations people are also not developers, just to be fair) and the mindset that a developer can and should be in charge of operation decisions is wrong (no offense, go do what you are good at).

I’ve seen many companies who think that because developers are technical, they can do any technical job. This is simply not true. Developers are good at writing code, systems administrators and engineers are good at operations, and maybe its that clash of opposing forces that has lead business to listen to the people writing the software instead of the people trying to keep the lights on (IT is utility right? (wrong)!). To again be fair, there are quite a few admins/engineers that still to this day do not realize they are service providers, there to help the business run efficiently.

The first item that jumped out at me was the fact that their backup systems and production systems were stored, essentially together. Any sysadmin worth his weight knows you need to keep your backups offsite. Well, you say, there backups were offsite at Amazon! True, but they were not offsite from their production systems, a massive failure to Amazon would impact their ability to operate normally as well as their ability to recover, so in this case the backups may have well as been sitting on top of the server they were running on.

Second, as a “cloud” provider, in this case a SaaS type SVN/code hosting service, should have operated on multiple IaaS or PaaS providers, not just Amazon. At the very least a disaster recovery site should have been setup on some other service. Had they set it up in just another availability zone they would have been just as easily and critically impacted.

CodeSpaces fate also shows the need for multifactor authentication. While I would consider their lack of foresight to place their backups on a separate provider unfortunate and based on poor design, not having multifactor authentication in place was downright lazy. Amazon offers a virtual “fob” which generates random codes as the second level authentication for…wait for…FREE. Thankfully they were not storing private keys at Amazon so customer data was presumably not accessed, just completely and totally lost.

So, what can you learn from CodeSpaces?

– Offsite to you does not mean offsite to your data. If you are using a 100% cloud service for running your business, you need a SEPARATE vendor for backup and DR,
– Use other providers for general high availability where you are running your application in multiple providers, not just mutliple availability zones with the same provider.
– Use two-factor authentication everywhere possible, at the very least where ever customer data and production systems are stored.

While its sad to see all the hardwork that went into building codespaces, as well as all the hardwork their customers lost, let this be a lesson to current and future startups as well as operations teams. It may also be a handy article to give to the CFO if your request for offsite backup or multifactor auth budget is denined!

My question is, so what? Doesn’t VMware’s own vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) provide this exact same functionality – provision AWS instances without the ability to migrate workloads? I don’t think this plugin from Amazon takes away from the vCAC market, in fact it probably hurts smaller vendors such as CloudBolt more than it hurts VMware. While you could argue that it might take away from vCloud Hybrid Serivce (vCHS) sales, doesn’t that really depend on your use case? In some cases the ability to provision AWS instances such as test/dev for example may not need to be migrated, so AWS would be fine where as VMs provisioned in response to increase demand may warrant moving back and forth between vCHS and a private vSphere/vCAC cloud.

So as I stated in my last post Learning to code, you will understand I plan on writing my trials and tribulations in the process. So I am learning PHP via code academy as I love PHP and it’s a great starting point.

I will be exploring a few options here and giving my tips on working with and getting started from my point of view various cloud platforms, programming tools and just pure head aches in learning to program.

The Platforms

This is something that opens up more worms then a bait shop, there are so many ways to get started with cloud programing. We will dive deeper into some cloud options in later posts but I will say I am truly inspired sharing my journey with everyone.

Some cloud options we will be exploring more will be:

Cloud Foundry– is an open platform as a service, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services. Under Pivotal

AWS -Amazon Web Services offers a complete set of infrastructure and application services that enable you to run virtually everything in the cloud: from enterprise applications and big data projects to social games and mobile apps.

Adobe Flex – Flex is a highly productive, open source application framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and devices.

Conduit Mobile -At Conduit Mobile, we’ve created an easy way for you to engage your users wherever they are. Our simple, yet powerful cloud-based mobile platform is built to meet the demands of the ever-evolving mobile world, giving you the tools you need to build a community for your brand, connect with your fans, manage your mobile user base easily and effectively, and always stay one step ahead.

App Inventor Google– Creating an App Inventor app begins in your browser, where you design how the app will look. Then, like fitting together puzzle pieces, you set your app’s behavior.

So I was looking for some WYSiWyG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that might make it easier and came across Wavemaker. Now understand that it was around 0230am when I came across this. So I start to research it some and I come to find out it was acquired by VMware in 2011 and as of May 2013 sold off to Pramati. I had no idea for two years VMware was sitting on this tool. I like how it is compatible with multiple operating systems, and I will get familiar with it during my journey.

I want to learn more and where better to explore these options then right on here. I know there are others looking to get into programming in some form and hopefully my journey will help them and make it easier for them. I have a wide range of tools from easy to use mobile builders to mainstream tools. I will post all tools I use and follow along post or two on each as I get familiar with this new world.